Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

@arielmt same energy https://web.archive.org/web/20080117032102/http://phoenix.cc.edu:80/MegaFloppy.htm

SD cards are a technology taken right out of early Gibson, real neuromancer shit. Incredible trash tech. Gigabytes of low quality abundance. Small enough to lose even when you're paying attention. Extraordinary but embarrassingly low grade.

There's very nice classy ones from SanDisk but there's so many more from nameless foundries for sale on AliExpress and a tenth the price, that mostly work.

(Chairman George Morrow would shit bluebirds: "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks", two obsolete things in one sentence.)

I'm using the big ones in my cp/m machine. Doing serious endurance testing and marginal testing. The really cheap ones do _weird_ things sometimes but work ok, mostly. I now have some good test code, ask me in a week....

With two cards installed, on the same SPI buss, doing random disk random block random read/write I *suspect* there is some odd stuff going on, but it's hard to separate code from electronics from the cards' various effects.

Pretty fucking interesting though.

I want to make the cheap cards as usable as the good ones. I think tristate buffers will do that.

Rooting for the underdogs.

back in the day, we all would scoff at deploying apps written in Lisp or Smalltalk because the binaries would end up being tens of megabytes with the runtime included. but in this era of gigabyte-sized static binaries and Electron apps, what's stopping us from going back

If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you're in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat. I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems.

The bucket is half foal

Have you taken a sip of water recently?

firing up my mastodon client by hand cranking it until a piston is a little bit past tdc, turning on the magneto, putting a blank 12 gauge cartridge in the receptacle in the cylinder head, and whacking it with a hammer

i will die on this hill

https://www.osnews.com/story/142677/servers-and-thin-clients-in-every-home-is-the-future-they-stole-from-us/

BASIC is a really nice language to just Get Something Done On The Computer Easy

i think more people should try BASIC dialects

Examples of things that people with average computer literacy can “just” do:

- just reboot it

- just email it to yourself [unless it’s over 25MB or contains an executable in which case you’re not gonna “just” anything]

- just use an iPhone instead

Examples of things people with average computer literacy absolutely cannot “just” do:

- just use Linux

- just run your own email server

- just replace this polished, slick-onboarding but expensive software with a foss alternative but make sure you use this fork because the official one had some drama and it’s kind of poorly maintained and also just simply be someone who doesn’t need accessibility features or just implement the accessibility features yourself in a special dialect of C++ that just needs a particular build of gcc from 1997 available on an ftp server that only appears during the Witching Hour on a new moon

- just use a VPN, one that’s not a privacy-violating scam I mean

- just set up a separate media server and torrent all your shows and connect all the kids’ devices to it and just don’t catch a virus or get scary legal threats in the mail doing this

- just refrain from decking your smug “helpful” computer-literate cousin in the face